Legendary is the Latest Company to Chase Windmills With a New 'Dune' Adaptation

I guess it was only a matter of time before Dune came up again.  Frank Herbert's seminal science-fiction novel checks all the right boxes for the modern franchise-crazy studio, so it's no surprise that a genre-friendly company like Legendary would eventually tackle the sprawling epic.

Over the years, Dune has been subjected to quite a few adaptations, most of which haven't made it to release.  In the early 1970s, surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky famously attempted to take the dense arguably unfilmable novel and adapt it into an even more dense and unfilmable movie (check out the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune to see how this insanely ambitious failed project may have influenced an entire generation of science-fiction filmmakers).  Shortly after, uber-producer/carnival barker Dino De Laurentiis tried several times to film the novel, but was unsuccessful until he hired David Lynch.  Lynch wrestled something up on the screen in 1984, but his film was so deliriously weird and nonsensical that it failed with both audiences and critics.  his failure seemed to kill the franchise for a while, all but confirming that the book was indeed too complicated to make properly.

However, in 2000, a mini-series from the channel formerly known as Sci-Fi breathed new life into the property.  That series was so successful that it begat a less well-received sequel titled Children of Dune.  Movie studios began to think that maybe the book wasn't so unfilmable after all, and with all the novels and short stories released in the same fictional universe, they likely couldn't help but salivate at the prospect of all those potential sequels. You know how much Hollywood loves their sequels.  One of the biggest recent near-misses was an adaptation by Peter Berg (Lone Survivor, Friday Night Lights, Battleship) that made it to pre-production, but fell apart because of its proposed $175 million budget.

Now, The Hollywood Reporter claims that Legendary Entertainment has been lured by the spice.  One of the more interesting bits from the original THR article (found here) is that Legendary is eyeing a multi-platform franchise, meaning they are going to simultaneously develop both film and TV projects for the Dune universe.  With that kind of announcement, I'm inclined to believe that we will actually see something from this deal.  Now, whether or not it will actually be good is another story entirely.